Adversary Tactics and Techniques specific to Cryptocurrency Scams

Abstract

At the end of the year 2020, there was a steep uptrend of the cryptocurrency market. The global market capitalization of cryptocurrencies climbed from 350 billion US$ in October 2020 to almost 2.5 trillion US$ in May 2021 and reached 3 trillion US$ in November 2021. Currently, there are more than 17,600 cryptocurrencies listed on CoinMarketCap. The ample amount of money within the market attracts investors as well as scammers and hackers. Recent incidents like the BadgerDAO hack have shown how easy it is to steal cryptocurrencies. While all the standard scamming and hacking techniques such as identity theft, social engineering and web application hacking are successfully employed by attackers, new scams very specific to cryptocurrencies emerged, which are the focus of this paper.